It seems like almost every book on self-development suggests that you take control of your inner dialogue – that stream of self-talk generated by your brain. You comment to yourself on almost everything, and virtually everybody I’ve had a conversation with about it says that the self-talk is mostly negative. There are some serious problem with that: (1) it colors your view of existence and often blinds you from noticing all wonders of life surrounding you; (2) the self-talk often comes out in the form of “other-talk” – the things you say to people often sound like the things you say to yourself and you aren’t always much fun to talk to; and (3) negative self-talk seems to take the form of “I can’t” way too much of the time – leading you to pass up opportunities for accomplishment that people with positive self-talk would likely take on.

About 3 years ago I decided to take the advice offered by many of these personal development authors and actually try to change my self talk. I tried two approaches. The first was to learn to stop it. That’s more or less what Zen disciples try to do, and I find it VERY difficult. Sometimes during meditation I can live in the space between the thoughts for a while, and that’s a very enjoyable feeling. But out in the real world, since I find it almost impossible to stop the dialogue, I’ve learned instead to replace it.

Instead of saying “that guy who just cut me off is an a**!” I try to say to myself, “Boy, he’s in a hurry!” Instead of saying, “So and so (somebody I’m working with) will probably screw this up,” I’ll say, “Let’s give her a try and see if she gets it done.” And probably the one thing I’ve learned to say to myself that’s made the most powerful difference, the real game changer, the thing that’s helped me get more done than ever before, and to take on new and more profound personal and business challenges, is, instead of saying, “I probably can’t do that,” I say, “I can definitely do that if I approach it the right way.”

Quitting is hard, but it can be really helpful. Ian and I wrote about it in our new book 101 Ways to Kick Your Ass Into Gear. But if you can’t quit, then you can try to replace your current habits with ones that help you become happier, more motivation, and potentially more successful!

I’ve always been fond of the Hopi maze symbol pictured above. It has many meanings, but one of the simpler ones is that life contains a special dream for you, and no matter how circuitous a path you take, you will get there. If you look closely at the symbol, you’ll notice that although it looks like a typical labyrinth, all the paths in fact lead to the middle. This of course implies that if you want to get to the end of the maze, you may as well just get going, because no matter how many detours you take, you’re still going to get there.Which isn’t bad advice for how to live.

If you’re paying attention in life, you’ll probably notice that even the best laid plans may not work out as you expected, whether as a result of some flaw you yourself built into the plan, or because of unpredictable outside influences. This is probably one of the greatest single causes of a litany of the “problems” we experience in life. Stress, anger, disappointment, depression – many of the states we experience that we perceive as negative often are a result of a single simple thing: un-met expectations. So one obvious solution would be to lower your expectations, as suggested in MadTV’s Lowered Expectations dating service skits. Another would be to just hunker down and wait until the bad stuff passes, because it usually does.

Both of those approaches will work in some way, but if you really want to discover peace of mind and and genuine satisfaction from life, there’s another tool you can apply, which is some basic spiritual knowledge. I always feel compelled to point out that by “spiritual” I don’t mean “religious”; a spiritual approach in my opinion is simply a practical application of of the concept of “doing the next right thing”, utilizing the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips for figuring out what that is for ourselves. When it comes to “trusting life”, I often recommend checking out Rob Breszny’s Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia, because it has a humorous secular spin on how well life is in fact working out, even when we’re failing to recognize it. Another great body of ideas is presented in Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws material. Chopra does a great job of imparting a lot of practical tools in an engaging narrative fashion.

There are MANY ways develop a practical spiritual aspect to your engagement with experience though. My development partner Nick has pursued rigorous discipline, and the wisdom intrinsic in the various martial arts he has studied intently for decades. After years of study, he became a teacher, and in my opinion, the student/teacher evolution is one of the greatest personal development tools in existence. I experienced my own personal spiritual evolution as a result of an odd mix of growing up in a liberal intellectual college town where Eastern philosophies were pervasive, and my later experiences with addiction and recovery. But however you achieve the ability to “trust life”, there are some very simple approaches that can help you out. I’ve outlined a few below, but this is hardly comprehensive, and not exactly secret wisdom or anything. Life really is a maze, so you really should explore the labyrinth in your OWN way, the mysteries and surprises should be part of the FUN, not part of the misery!

Expect Surprises – “The Plan D” Method

The most common cause of almost all the anger and unhappiness I see people experiencing is a result of things simply not going the way they expected. The resulting anger, stress, and unhappiness then manifests not only as toxic interactions in relationships, but even diminished physical well-being, whether as physical fatigue, tension, poor immune response, or even cardiovascular issues. It is now fairly well documented that mental and emotional stress is directly connected to physical health issues. My personal approach is based on what I jokingly refer to as my “Plan D” method. Some people don’t even have a “Plan B” when they set out to do something, which is a guaranteed setup for ongoing frustration. But I add extra layers. They go something like this:

Plan A – This is exactly what I want to happen
Plan B – This an alternate plan to still achieve exactly the results I’m seeking
Plan C – This is the realization that a huge compromise may have to be made
Plan D – This is total surrender of my will to forces completely beyond my control

This requires a little extra thinking, but the energy spent on the extra thinking is more than rewarded by the energy NOT expended on frustration when things go wrong. If you want to use the war metaphor, remember there will always be another battle. And if you prefer a less hostile analogy, remember that sometimes you just need to get the house built. You can always renovate later. Plan D is probably the toughest for most of us to implement, but may be the most important one. You are not always going to get your cake. Get used to it and have a cookie instead.

Trust Yourself

This one is a continual challenge for me. My willingness to look at multiple aspects of a situation sometimes leads me to not trusting my own “gut” on something. Nick has a great approach for busting through this kind of problem. He often refers to the idea of “Don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING”, adding some extra oomph to the idea that sometimes simply taking action is the best solution to moving through doubt. I talk about self-talk a lot, because one of the greatest obstacles for trusting things to work out is simply learning that there’s a big chatterbox in our own heads that may be working against us. Over and over I find that when something went really wrong with a pursuit, I was failing to “listen to my heart”. And by that I mean a balance of rational thought and what my “gut” or instincts told me. If you have deep-rooted self-doubt issues, maybe therapy would help. But more often, we’re simply dealing with our own poor habits, and therapy can even be counter-productive. Consider a life coach. But if even that seems like too much fuss, just practice learning to TRUST YOURSELF! The solutions are almost always right there inside you. Thinking is over-rated sometimes.

Share Yourself

People aren’t typically psychic, so it’s unlikely that they know what’s going on in your head. In spite of this obvious fact, many people seem to operate on a big assumption that since THEY’RE thinking something, everyone ELSE must be thinking it. Remember that the things that you think and feel aren’t always apparent to others, even when you lay them out as a linear plan. Sharing your feelings and broader views – simply being open to others – can have a profoundly positive effect on others’ ability to support and trust you, and all this trust in life I’m talking about is really about trusting PEOPLE, not just some mysterious set of forces that we call “life”, right?

Me, I’m gonna go back to bumping into walls now. And having a good laugh when I do.

Do you ever talk to yourself? Maybe you should. I’m always a little surprised when I ask people I’m working with if they’ve ever heard of or put to work the concept of “self talk” and they say “no”, because it’s such a common tool in therapy and recovery. But on reflection, maybe that’s part of the problem. For many of us, our first exposure to the concept is probably when someone mocks the over-the-top books of affirmations that are in the self-help section at the book store, or – as in my case – in a 12-step setting when someone talks about “playing the tape” in their head. It’s unfortunate that in an attempt to teach the concept, it gets so dumbed-down as to be useless, because when used in a common-sense and practical way, it can be the one of the single most powerful tools for being a happy and successful person. So what are we talking about when we talk about “self talk”? Well, not everyone’s mind works exactly the same way, but what we’re talking about is the positive or negative messages our own thoughts guide us with on a daily basis. Do you know what kind of positive or negative messages you send YOURSELF each day? There’s a simple way to figure this out, and the results may surprise you. And before you start tailoring a NEW message, it makes sense to get in there and get a sense of what your mind is already doing.

Just Listen To Yourself!

The first step? It’s incredibly simple, but a little challenging at first. Listen to you mental processes, and make a solid commitment to do so for a few days. The first time I did this, it was at the recommendation of a life coach (more about that below). I recognized the value of what she was suggesting, but honestly thought I already knew what was going on in my head, so did it grudgingly. I have to admit I was blown away by the negative chatter in my head. I tend to operate with a bit of a “hope for the best, plan for the worst” mentality. When I keep this in balance, it’s very effective for me. I stay positive and optimistic for the most part, and do just a little mental preparation to accept occasional undesired outcomes. But when I made a conscious effort to just LISTEN to my thoughts for a couple of days, I suddenly realized that this approach of mine had drifted WAY into the “plan for the worst” zone. I was spending half my day injecting semi-negative expectations into everything I was doing. Oddly, the most important downside of this wasn’t really the negativity; I’d still show up for meetings or whatever and be my usual positive self.

No Matter Where I Go, There I Aren’t

The bigger problem was the simple fact that I was never “being where I was”. Listening attentively to my own thoughts for a few days was tricky at first. The mind tends to prefer going about its business unquestioned. But as I continued to do this for a couple of days, I noticed two more things that I didn’t think I did so often. One was a low-level constant comparison of my physique. I’d constantly look at men or women and almost silently compare myself to them. The other was a tendency to in effect say “I should do something about that” with regard to just about every negative self-perception I have. Whether it is a bad work habit, a diet or fitness pattern I’d like to change, or something I do or say in a relationship. It was as if my mind felt like simply acknowledging a fact was an adequate step for now. Which it is, until you do this every day for months or years, and it just becomes a reinforcing observation.

Don’t Gimme No Backtalk!

So once you have a sense of what kind of mental chatter you have going on, what’s next? At this point a lot of well-intentioned self-improvement gurus get it all wrong in my opinion, suggesting positive affirmations similar to the ones that the Stuart Smalley character poked fun at. This might work for some of us, but for someone like me, this approach is doomed to failure. I have a totally rebellious nature, and don’t even trust MYSELF when I tell me how great I am. And the “play the tape” metaphor? My mind doesn’t work like a tape recorder, and besides, WHO USES TAPE RECORDERS anymore? I had to try a different, two-pronged approach. One part consisted of simply focusing on being grateful, and pausing to be thankful for all the good stuff that is constantly going on around me. I’d pick a single thing in my environment, whether it was the fresh air I was breathing, the cool car across the street, or the kind person that had just held a door for me. Just putting energy into something like that would sidetrack any negative anticipatory chatter, and give my thoughts some positive momentum. The other part consisted of taking action whenever I caught myself thinking “I really should”. That’s one thing that Stuart nailed dead on. No one wants to be “shoulding all over themselves”, right?

All Self-Talk And No Action

Vincent Van Gogh said “If you hear a voice within you saying, You are not a painter, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” Simply taking action has a profound impact on how we think. So what will work for you? You’ll have to figure part of that out yourself. In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, he talks about autosuggestion, and says “concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession”. In Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, he suggests you list all of your desires, and carry the list everywhere, looking at it morning, night, and before meditation. Those of a more religious bent will suggest daily affirmations and prayers. But these approaches all have one thing in common. Repetition and persistence! If you’re not sure which of the many approaches to constructive self-talk is best, there’s a great book that I find myself recommending constantly. It’s Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson. I’ve never tried the expanded class or workshop products, but this simple book is chock full of useful and amusing tools and metaphors for identifying the ways in which your own mind may be undermining your intentions.

So It’s All In My Head?

No. And that’s probably one of the most important parts of all of this. While books like Taming Your Gremlin are an awesome resource to get you going, you’re going to find it a lot more productive if you externalize some of this stuff and get some useful feedback. You could even just share notes with a friend, but personally I got a lot more out of some brief work with a life coach. It was life coach Dori Weinstein that turned me on to the Gremlin book. And although I get a small spiff if you buy that book on Amazon, that’s an unpaid endorsement for Dori. I got more out of four sessions with her than I did from dozens of therapy sessions in the past. And although I have nothing against therapy, this is one case where I think it would be counterproductive, because it’s so focused on reflection and introspection. Getting in touch with your self talk and changing it is a continuous and action-oriented pursuit that thrives with external input to the mostly closed system that is the adult mind. So the next time you catch yourself talking to yourself, remember to eavesdrop. And if you’re getting a bad rap, feel free to stick up for yourself.

Building a Better Fork

The fact is that – aside from possibly having an actual chemical imbalance that may require professional treatment – when we feel like our plate is too full, we’re probably just using the wrong utensils, or our “eyes are bigger than our stomach” as the old saying goes. Part of the problem is often that once you’re bumped up into some level of stress, there’s a good possibility that your mental faculties are slightly impaired, and the effect can snowball a little, so that things that are actually very manageable seem in our mind to be an un-tameable monster. We’ll discuss more sophisticated forks in a future piece, but one simple tool that I turn to myself on occasion, and that I’ve shared with others numerous times with instant results is what I call the Breakdown Scale. If you have a big ball of confusion in your head right now, grab a pen and paper and try the simple method below.

The Breakdown Scale

First, without prioritizing or trying to order things, list the things that are eating at you. Second, we’re going to use a scale where zero is no stress at all, and ten is a figurative nervous breakdown. Go through the list, and try to honestly assess how stress-inducing each item is. There’s nothing scientific here, but you may notice a couple of things right away. The first is that once you externalize these items, before you even score them, you may notice that the hurricane in your head was really only three or four things, and simply writing them down alleviated half of the stress and confusion. Another thing that you may notice – especially if you really DO have a lot going on – is that if ten is a nervous breakdown, the total of all the individual items could easily be over twenty, depending on the highly subjective nature of the scoring we’re doing here. So first, let’s talk about the scoring, and then we’ll touch on what to do with the numbers. As we said, this is highly subjective, so for one person, something like moving to a new home can be a 9 or 10 by itself, while for another person, moving is simply time and work, with little stress attached at all, and may be only a 2 or 3. The same applies to lots of things in life. We all find different things stressful.

What To Do With These Numbers

Well, if you only had two or three items on your list, and the scores were similar, just arbitrarily pick one item to tackle, do as much as you can about it, and whatever you CAN’T do anything about, make an achievable task list for the item, and LET IT GO for now. Then do the same with the other item or items. If your list was a little more elaborate, we’ll apply the same principle. Here’s an example I’ve recreated from memory from years ago when I learned to use this method. I was changing jobs, was in an unhealthy relationship, and was in the process of moving to a new city as well! My head was a frantic but undefinable mass of mental flotsam and jetsam. I was PARALYZED. Here’s roughly how I scored the list: Moving 8 Relationship 12 (yes, this is cheating for dramatic effect) New Job 5

Using A Fork & Knife In Unison

That’s a pretty darn short list to make someone crazy in the head, right? Simply looking at the list and the numbers immediately gave me a framework to operate within though, and an opportunity for a little humor. Of COURSE I was freaking out; my “Breakdown Scale” was at 25! I was in double-breakdown mode! The reality was that looking at the short list and the simple numbers gave me a start. Yes, from a subjective point of view the relationship score was off the scale, and yes, even if I were less dramatic in the scoring, I’d still be over ten. But what it helped me realize was that I needed to carve this big rump-roast of trouble into bite-size pieces. “Moving” was like a big piece of meat in itself. I needed to slice it into little bites like “call utility companies”, “buy more boxes”, and “take items to Goodwill”, all of which are quite easy to swallow, and can be paced over several meals. The “Relationship” score was off the scale because relationships can be like open buffets, pot lucks, or all-out food fights. It depends on what the parties are bringing to the table. I realized that with that item, I needed to sit down and discuss the menu with my dining partner before I even knew what the score really was. So how do we tackle such a wide variety of things with justs lists and numbers? With logic and and common sense. And more food metaphors to keep it amusing for ourselves.

Creating Bite Size Pieces, and Making a Diet Plan

The way to approach this list has two simple rules:

• Small achievable items first
• Break big items into little items

Nibble at the appetizer or small salad before you tackle the entrees. Make sure to clear the table and take your time between courses. If some item on your plate is unwieldy and keeps sliding around, maybe you shouldn’t be eating so fast! Put it into a to-go box and snack on it later. If you know how big your plate really is, and how big a meal you’re tackling, pretty soon you’ll be in the Clean Plate Club with no signs of indigestion at all.

So what’s your story? In my case, Nick’s request that I tell the story of my recovery as a “hero’s journey” made me aware of two things. One was that as important as this story was, it wasn’t my “hero’s journey”. And two, that in spite of having a clear idea of what my “real” story was, I wasn’t sure how to tell the story any more, and in fact, wasn’t sure if I really even wanted to take that book off the shelf at all! Let me explain. I experienced a LOT of death and loss around me as a youngster, as well as some sexual abuse experiences. This had a tremendous impact on my development, but not in ways that would be obvious to people I had just met. Often in my life, when meeting someone knew, the way things would play out would be that  in the first moderately in-depth conversation that took place, they’d make a remark like “oh, you’re one of those people who’s always looking for some deeper meaning in things”, or something to that effect. If you’re a “survivor” type, you may be familiar with this response, and you’ll immediately understand the mild annoyance that a remark like this might engender. For a long time, my response to this harmless kind of remark would be to “tell my story”, at whatever pace the listener seemed able to stomach things. This either made them figuratively run in horror, or immediately bond much more deeply, either out of kinship, sympathy, or respect. So if the story was true, and people connected with it on some level, what was the problem? Well, the problem was that by “telling the story”, I was in a way perpetuating it. In spite of all my assumed self-examination and the evolution I had pursued in other ways, the profound effect of this seemingly simple aspect of our behavior had escaped me somehow.

So how did I become aware of this pattern, and what did I do about it? Well, I first recall it coming up around the time I got sober a few years ago, in a conversation with a woman I had just met who I thought I might be interested in getting more involved with. We were talking about ourselves the way people might as they start letting some barriers down, and I started to share some of my “old story”. Suddenly, I realized I was only doing this out of habit, and that I had a NEW story I’d rather tell. A story about being excited with my life and new things I was doing, and things I’d like to still do. I shared what was going on, and she quite simply said “Yeah, we all have a story don’t we? I wonder if maybe that’s one of the things that limit us?” We then had a really long discussion exploring the importance of “having a story” as a way to define ourselves, but how once you get the story outlined pretty well, you have probably also managed to freeze your growth in a small way. I decided around that time to stop telling my “old story”, and instead remain aware that I can write a NEW story. This had a compelling impact on my personal relationships. If you’re someone who has been through the more intense things that life throws our way – loss, violence, or random misfortunes – you may have become something of a survivor, and probably attract other people like this into your life. Many of my best friends are people who had an exceptional challenge thrown their way, and grew through it rather than being beaten down. But once I took this new view that I was “starting a new book”, I suddenly realized that even the most inspiring of these friends of mine still had little footnotes of their story kicking around. One friend, who is a brilliant writer, singer, mom, and amateur athlete, will still randomly toss out a joke about her sister that sexually abused her. Another friend, who is a remarkably talented songwriter and performer, amazingly takes what are actually positive parts of his story – his previous successes in the music industry – to perpetuate a failure to evolve!

As a friend, I have no choice but to call these friends out on this, usually with some positive result. So now I’m going to call YOU out:

What’s your story?
Does your story limit you?
Does your story have useful lessons in it?
What parts of your story can you put on the shelf as an informative chapter?
What’s your NEW story?

There are lots of ways to explore these issues, and the one my friend Nick shared – the “Hero’s Journey” – is just one. The simplest way is to simply be honest with yourself and identify the themes you seem to repeat as part of how you explain yourself, see which ones may need some resolution, finish the chapter, and start a new one. If you’re living and breathing, you haven’t finished the book! Start the next chapter RIGHT NOW, it’s as easy as putting your old book on the shelf and starting a new one.

* Oddly, psychology has historically focused on aberrant behavior rather than healthy behavior. Barbara Fredrickson is one of the better known and respected psychologists who study positivism. Her books like Positivity: The 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life can give you some actionable methods for re-writing your story.

First of all, the serenity prayer often associated with Alcoholics Anonymous:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Okay. Before I do my own deconstruction, let’s observe how much it resembles a mother Goose rhyme from 1695:

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

And here’s how I re-frame it to make it not only palatable to myself, but quite useful.

“God grant me the serenity”

Let’s stop right there. I do coincidentally believe in God in a way that I won’t go into here, but I don’t necessarily find this grant-seeking useful here. So I change it to:

“Whoa. Chill out for a moment”

Okay, now I can think about what to do next:

“to accept the things I cannot change”

Still not crazy about the wording, but now that I’ve slowed down for a moment, I ask myself “wow, can I really do anything about this right now? If I can, I do. If I can’t, I put it in my little “to review” box for later consideration, and let it go for the moment.

And then…

“the courage to change the things I can”

If I really need to, I just buck up a little and remind myself that whatever it is I’m contending with, it’s highly unlikely that it’s insurmountable.
And lastly, that bit where it goes:

“and the wisdom to know the difference”

Well, just by slowing down and re-assessing, I’ve already exercised some wisdom. I let it all go, knowing that if I made an unwise decision, it’ll come and bite me in the ass and I can do this all over again.

So here’s my version:

Whoa, chill out for a minute. Time out!
Can I fix this right now? Cool. Let’s do it.
No? Okay, let’s take care of this as soon as we can.
We’ve done the best thing we can do for now, which is identified it for review.
Let’s move on.

Damn I’m havin’ a good day!

But seriously, doing that many things without a coherent system would be exhausting. Trying to do that many things well without organizing principles would be insane. So what I want to share with you today is the common vision that helps organize my approach to business. Hopefully you’ll find that this idea helps you carry out your personal mission or missions more effectively.

The vision is this – to be successful at just about anything, you have to have all three corners of what I call the “Triangle of Success” – skills, effort, and attitude. If you’re missing any one of these, it can be a lot harder to reach your goals.

Skills are the special products or services that you offer the world. If you’re a doctor – a spine surgeon for example – your skills are the abilities to diagnose and surgically treat problems with the spine. In my SEO business, my skills include the ability to diagnose websites, blogs, and social media for their effectiveness, and to recommend or take actions to make them more effective.

Effort is how hard you try to when you provide your skill to other people. Over the years, I’ve learned to be really good at looking at businesses and finding the things that are holding them back, but if I never tell anybody I can do it, I’m not making much effort. If I were to just look at a few aspects of a business that hired me and mumble some suggestions, I’d be making more effort, but nowhere near enough to be great at it.

Attitude is your belief that you can succeed and how well you can instill that belief in others. Being able to get a class of martial artists energized and sweating is not too hard. On the other hand, it takes strong conviction to convince groups of people, day in and day out, that what they are sweating for will truly change their lives for the better.

I believe three things are true about the Triangle of Success: (1) each corner is connected to the other two; (2) an equilateral triangle is the best recipe for success; and (3) taking a “learning” approach to building your triangle will really help you succeed!

When I say that each corner is connected to the other two, I mean it’s almost impossible to maintain or improve one aspect of success without employing the other two. Your skills will only improve if you make an effort to improve them, and you’ll have a lot more energy to make that effort if you believe success is both possible and desirable. Your efforts to bring your product or service to other people will be a lot more effective if your skills are obviously good and if your positive attitude shows. Your attitude will be better if you feel good about your skills and your efforts yield results.

When I say that an equilateral triangle is best, I mean your best results will come when you give similar amounts of attention to all three corners. A highly skilled salesman who is lazy and negative will never prosper. A tireless carpenter who can’t make a square joint and who swears at his customers won’t build many houses. The most positive motivational speaker in the world who goes mute in front of a crowd and doesn’t learn to control her stage fright is unlikely to reach many people. On the other hand, a slightly skilled person who gives 100% effort and has a great attitude will usually become very successful.

And finally, when I say that taking a learning approach will get you far, I’m talking about using each corner of the triangle to help improve the other corners. When you make the effort to provide the best possible service (business analysis, for example), it will become obvious when you’re lacking a skill that you need to get the job done. Use the information to go out and improve your skills, or hire someone who knows how to do the thing you don’t. Ask yourself if you have any beliefs that could hinder your ability to build business relationships, and if you do, find a way to discard them and your efforts will be far more efficient. Keep your mind open to learning and positive change, and your triangle will grow in height, width, and weight.

Now remember, don’t just go out and do something, DO SOMETHING!

People all over the world have picked up on Cole’s saying. It’s the title of a lot of blogs and personal development talks. Zig Ziglar used the saying in his motivational speeches, and you can find it in his books. One I think you ought to read, if you’re into personal development, is Embrace the Struggle: Living Life on Life’s Terms. The point of the saying is that, when life gets you down, you shouldn’t stay down. You’ve probably heard, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” In the martial arts world we say, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”

Anyway, with all due respect to these very accomplished guys, I don’t think the saying goes far enough. If you’ve spent as much time as I have studying the science of self-improvement, you probably realize that learning to recover from adversity is only the first step. If you want to become truly outstanding, you’ve got find a way to build personal evolution into your DNA.

So I’d change the saying to: “You don’t drown by falling in water, you drown by not getting out and learning to swim!”

Ups and downs are not just part of life, they are life. Once you’ve figured out a mindset or strategy for moving through adversity, like picking yourself up after you get by hard times, then you can start working on real accomplishment. And you don’t get it by doing the same things over and over. Like falling in the water and pulling yourself out! If you do, you’ll find yourself in the same situations over and over, and I don’t think that’s the formula for real personal achievement.

You see, every challenge has built into it the germ or seed of its own solution. “Hey,” you say, “last time I fell in the water I got out, and here I am, doing great!” But there’s an aspect of dealing with challenges that’s even more important, more profound, and probably far more life changing than just figuring out how to solve life’s immediate problems. If we think about it, each challenge can teach us the lessons we need for real, meaningful, lasting personal change.

The truth is, most of us ignore these lessons. It’s like we deliberately tune out the most profound lessons that life teaches us, virtually all the time. We suffer through some crisis, get our lives more or less back to normal, sit back and say, “whew, I’m glad that’s over,” and forget to change the fundamental behaviors or attitudes that got us into the crisis in the first place.

Now, that might be because taking the action called for by lesson is difficult, or involves some sacrifice, hard work, or change in our thinking, but it’s almost never impossible. I know this because there are always people out there who have learned the lesson we were supposed to learn. Let me give you an example.

After you fall into the water and pull yourself out a few times, even if you’re darn proud of figuring out how not to drown, you’re probably thinking, “darn it, isn’t there some other way to handle this?” And that little voice in your head might say, “hey, dummy! Stay out of the water.” And if you do that, you’re not going to fall in anymore.

But what if the water is where you really need to be? Maybe all the most exciting things are happening in the water. That’s where you learn the most, get the biggest reward, meet the coolest people. So you have a lot of motivation to get back in the water, you’re just tired of hauling yourself out. And if you look around next time you fall in, just before you pull yourself out, you pay attention to what all the other people are doing in there. They seem to be having a good time, you know, getting a lot done, making friends, learning a ton by staying in there for so long. So, you ask yourself, “what are they doing that I’m not doing?” And darn it, that voice in your head answers you again. “Hey slowpoke, they’re swimming!”

So, the point is, don’t just keep pulling yourself out, learn to swim! If you find something you absolutely, positively need to do, but you keep doing belly flops when you try it, don’t you think it’s time to do more than just pull yourself out? Look around and figure out what the really successful people are doing. Learn to do what they’re doing. And the surprising thing is, most of them are happy to give you some tips. And when you get good at swimming, you can go in the water anytime you want, and get all kinds of work done there.

Visualize your goal, plan your mission, and don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING!

Faking It On The Inside – The Science, And Some Common Wisdom

So. Can this “fake it ’til you make it” idea actually have a measurable impact? Yes. Not only have there been studies that prove that simply pretending to feel a certain way will help you actually feel that way, but in an interesting twist, it turns out that the simple process of intentionally smiling can have physiological results that are like reverse-engineered happiness. It’s also a fairly well-established aspect of therapeutic or behavior modification strategies to consciously and intentionally change your thought patterns if you exhibit a lot of negative thinking. Therapists and personal coaches will call this “self-talk”. Most of us have an ongoing chatter in our minds that constantly judges, analyzes, and anticipates. If you’re fortunate, maybe you don’t do a lot of negative self-talk, but many of us do, and don’t even realize it. You might want to explore this idea if you haven’t. You can do it pretty informally. Just take the time to listen to your own thoughts, and you may notice that they’re completely formed phrases, or you may find they’re less-defined muttering. For just a day, try to listen to what the little voice in your head is saying, and how it says it. I noticed a long time ago that when I’m having a stressful day, there’s literally a little chattering voice in my head over-anticipating things; usually a little negatively. This is a process that can otherwise be useful to me – as part of my personalized “hope for the best, plan for the worst” approach – but can seriously undermine my intentions when it gets out of control. I learned a lot of great tools for identifying and dealing with these little demons in a book a personal coach recommended called Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way, by Rick Carson. It’s written in an insightful and amusing style, with simple pencil and paper tests to help you identify that inner chatter, and learn to work with it. It wasn’t dramatically life-changing for me or anything, but it offered me a way to approach a problem I knew that I had, but wasn’t doing anything about. And in a rather amusing, playful way.

So the takeaway here? When you’re feeling less than enthusiastic, first try working with your negative self-talk. You can’t simply say “I’m going to be happy!”, because the unconscious mind tends to rebel against conscious demands that ask it to be anything other than what it is already being. But you can practice a little intentional positivism, and you can listen to and work with negative mental habits. Most thought is fairly habitual, and evolving your mental habits in a more positive direction tends to have cumulative positive effects. And smile, even if you don’t feel like it. Even though it’s probably a myth that it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, you never know who might smile back, and where it will lead!

Faking It On The Outside – Creating An Impression

In a way, you’re “faking it” the first day you start creating your business. One day, you have a skill you haven’t marketed. The next day, you have a business card, a web site, or an office, and even though you may not have any customers yet, you say “I have a business that does such and such“. If that’s not faking it, I don’t know what is. But it’s essential “faking it”; it would in fact be more accurately described as “having a dream”. This kind of faking it is more about maintaining an impression through your personal demeanor, packaging of services, or the methods that you use to keep you motivated. If you study the experiences of some of the world’s most successful people, many of them have an anecdote about the point where they almost gave up, maybe even moving in with their parents or friends at the age of thirty, but hanging on to an office or workplace when it seemed absolutely absurd to any rational person to continue. I used a lot of the more reasonable elements of this “faking it” to build a moderately successful business within a year, creating “new media” content for small business. I then used it to survive a couple of early rough patches, which taught me that if you tough it out, and keep kidding yourself things will be okay, guess what? They will! My big mistake came not too much later though, when this became more like a method than a safety net, and I failed to get real at a point when I should have taken on a partner and employees to grow the business, and sputtered to a standstill about four years into things. I wish Seth Godin had written The Dip a little sooner; I learned a lot of lessons he talks about in that book the hard way. The “eating Ramen, waiting tables” hard way.

Creating An Impression vs Bullshitting

I’m really not going to go into the kind of faking it that involves buying houses, cars, and clothes you can’t afford so that you can build a network marketing empire by fooling others into believing that it was your fantastic product and salesmanship that paid for everything. The pathetic desperation of that approach speaks for itself. But there’s nothing wrong – as I suggested above – with using a little creative audacity, a confident demeanor, and some clever marketing pieces to get things rolling. On top of things like simply dressing the part or otherwise “packaging” my services, I’ve resorted to some seemingly dastardly tricks that are actually completely harmless. The first was having the audacity to set up a web site that said “Hey! We do web sites, and we know what we’re doing!”. I was confident that I had done the footwork and wasn’t lying, but at the time it was a bit of a leap. Things went just fine though, and pretty quickly I was securing clients, clients who were happy enough with my services that about 50% of my revenue was by referral. The first time I pitched a really big client though, I ran into a little problem. I lost the bid, and followed up with the former potential client, who was cool enough to share with me why I didn’t get the job when I asked them. Their reason? They explained that even though they liked my pitch and felt more confident about my abilities than the people they hired, they simply felt more confident because the “other guy” was two guys. Well, that was pretty easy to fix. Not too long after that, I was pitching a job to a bank. I have a female friend who gives a really strong impression of being organized and professional, but also exudes a subtle, seemingly flirty charm without trying. Guess who I took to the pitch meetings as my “administrative associate”? Exploitative? Not at all. I got the job, and was able to flip my friend a couple hundred bucks for just taking some notes at a meeting. The most extreme example I’ve heard of this “trick” was when two developers I knew were pitching to a team of obnoxious, arrogant MBA’s who were working on a well-funded startup. My friends brought THREE women to the first pitch meeting. They were all part-time models, and no-one said ANYTHING about what their roles were. The MBA’s were so self-absorbed with trying to impress the women they thought they’d be working with that they were basically committed at the very first meeting.

So What’s The Simple Takeaway With All Of This?

Yes. Fake it in positive ways if you need to. If you sit around waiting for venture capital and inspiration from the ether, you may never pursue your dream, which is probably more achievable than you know. Smile when you don’t feel like it. Pretty soon you will. If you need to dress things up to sell something, don’t lie, just imply. And most importantly, if you have to kid yourself a little to get through tough times, don’t make it such a habit that you accept tough times as a business model.

The saying is “everything happens for a reason.”

People say it when something bad happens to them. Keith Miller was the guy being interviewed on NPR. He’d been a professional football player, and he’s now actually a very successful opera singer! That’s an extreme change, right? He had played for five years in the European and the Arena Football leagues, both of which no longer exist. When the leagues went out of business, he found himself without a job. He said he was a fan of opera, and he went on to study it and is now one of most celebrated bass-baritones on stage. He’s singing Madame Butterfly with the Washington National Opera.

What You Say Affects What You Think!

When Keith Miller said “everything happens for a reason,” he meant basically the same thing we mean when we say “when one door closes, another opens.” If we’re wired for success, we should re-write both of these phrases to get them out of the passive voice. We should say them this way:

“Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, I choose the reason.”

and:

“When one door closes, I open another.”

You Have Control When You Take Control

If we’re really going to excel in life, we need to stop thinking in terms of when something is going to happen to us, and start thinking in terms of making things happen. Which mindset you choose can make a gigantic difference to what you get in life. It made a difference of epic proportions in Keith Miller’s life, and that’s because he chose to make things happen. Here’s what he said, and if you get chance to read the whole interview, I recommend it, because he’s a very articulate guy and his story is a fascinating one. The show is in the NPR archives for March 2, 2011. Anyway, here’s what he said:

“It’s the one thing I’ve learned, is everything always happens for a reason You know, the biggest losses that we’ve suffered, I mean, in personal life, professional football, you know, when you lose something, you have to go back and diagnose. You’re more apt to go back and diagnose the things that you did wrong, what you can improve upon. And when things go well, you don’t really at the end of the night you know, you just say, oh well, you know, thanks, that was great. You don’t take the time to really assess.

“So you really need to have speed bumps in your life to kind of say, hey, what – you know, make some adjustments, fine tune things or just, you know, change the transmission completely.”

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I don’t know if he’s studied success systems, but that’s a great way to explain the benefit of adversity in our lives. When bad things happen, we should reflect on what happened, consider whether we could have done something better or could do something better in the future, and then make adjustments to our actions. The adjustments may just be fine tuning, or we may need to completely change the transmission! It’s as though he’s been reading my journals. Look at steps three through seven from my last talk “Don’t Just Do Something, DO SOMETHING!”

3. Do something!

4. Pay attention to your results

5. Multiply your successes

6. Modify or discard your failures

7. Do something else!

You’re Not the Problem, Unless You ARE the Problem!

The people who fail, who don’t grow, are often people who, when they experience a failure, either keep doing the same things that caused the failure or simply stop trying. That leads to paralysis. Soon they feel like they can’t do anything, and that can lead to a pretty miserable life.

The people who succeed recognize that, as Zig Ziglar says, “failure is an event, not a person.” And how they think about that event makes all the difference in the world. They recognize that they can learn from failures.

When you try to do something great – that’s step three: Do something! – and you don’t succeed, you can  “go back and diagnose the things you did wrong” – that’s step four: Pay attention to your results. Steps five and six are what Keith called making “some adjustments, fine tune things or just …. change the transmission completely.”

Change Something, and Pay Attention!

What a great lesson! No wonder people who do really well say that it’s not about winning and losing. It’s about doing! If you DO SOMETHING with your goal clearly in mind, then the failures will be lessons clearly written out for you to modify your actions in the future. If we could go through life enthusiastically doing things without worrying about whether we instantly succeed or fail, think how much we could learn! What a great mindset to teach our children. “When one door closes, I open another.”

You know what, I’m going to go share this idea with my daughter right now. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, you choose the reason. And if the reason is to teach you what you need to do to succeed, you can be as wildly successful as any human being can ever hope to be.